


living is harder

by Verbyna



Series: call me son (one more time) [10]
Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Age Difference, Bad Parenting, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, M/M, Mentors, Unhealthy Relationships, fancy dinners and Gucci shirts, hashtag adulthood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-30
Updated: 2018-10-30
Packaged: 2019-08-10 22:13:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,331
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16463333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Verbyna/pseuds/Verbyna
Summary: Alicia figures out that Kent is considering retirement from the way he stops talking about the future.





	living is harder

**Author's Note:**

  * For [blithelybonny](https://archiveofourown.org/users/blithelybonny/gifts).



> big thanks to the #hellsquad for beta work and much hand-holding.
> 
> this one's for mal, who just got a kent parson-themed tattoo and became the real mvp.

Alicia figures out that Kent is considering retirement from the way he stops talking about the future. He buys himself another shiny red car, doesn’t tweet about anything other than his charity work, and does his level best to be nothing but surface.

Most people don’t notice, but Alicia knows better. He may not understand himself, but that’s why he has her, isn’t it? 

Her schedule is easy to clear; Alicia pays two separate people to do that sort of thing for her. She charters the flight and books a car herself, though, to avoid blind items in the gossip rags down the line.

 

*

 

She hands the keys of her rental to Kenny’s valet and gives her name in the lobby, then checks her email while they ring up Kent to announce her. He was probably sleeping. It’s April, when all hockey players at this level do is sleep, eat, and pop painkillers.

He’ll miss a lot of things about the NHL, but not this. One more season and he’d end up like Bob - muscle for days, the kind he’ll keep until his mind starts to slip, and bones like Frankenstein’s monster. Only strong to look at.

Every time she sees Kent these days, it breaks her heart a little. She knows how hard it is to sleep when staying still hurts more than moving.

 

*

 

The ride up to Kent’s apartment is always a strange experience. The elevator moves too fast for it to be comfortable, not like the slow ascent to her place. It’s all reflective metal walls and dated music that she hated at the time; it makes her feel old but lucky, too, to have lived long enough to feel it.

Maybe she should’ve told Kent she was coming, but when he opens the door, he also opens his arms like he was waiting. She presses her face against the hickey on his neck.

“Sweetheart,” she says, pulling back a little to look him over. “You have to show me the car later.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Kent says. His arms tighten like a spasm before letting her go, but his voice is relaxed. He smiles down: a real smile, though unfamiliar.

Free, maybe. Free enough to change her heart rate. It’s only unfamiliar on him. She’s burned down enough bridges to recognize the expression.

“I’m gonna get you drunk,” Kent says. “Oh, is that Gucci? I’m getting you drunk. Come in.”

 

*

 

Kent isn’t drinking, but he hands her an opened bottle of Krug and a cheap wine glass. He never got around to buying new champagne glasses after his rookies broke the set she gave him for his first apartment.

“I should’ve bought you cutlery,” she says, swigging from the bottle.

“But where’s the fun in that?”

There’s a plate of actual homecooked food steaming behind him, so fun must be hard to come by right now. Carrots, chicken. Maybe he took a class.

“Tell me something,” she asks. (A hundred nights in her kitchen, maybe a dozen in his. This is a game until it isn’t.)

“I didn’t cook this,” Kent confesses. “Tell me something else.”

“I dumped my boyfriend.”

“Is that why you’re here?”

She smiles. “Just making conversation. He was too young for me anyway. All that _energy,”_ she says, shuddering to make Kent laugh.

“I wouldn’t know,” Kent says, and puts the wine glass in the sink. “Drink up.”

 

*

 

Twenty minutes later, after she changed into one of his clean shirts with his name across the back, they’re on the terrace, and Kent is rolling a cigarette.

He’s not very good at it.

Jack used to smoke weed as a teenager; she doesn’t know why he never taught Kent how to roll worth a damn. Maybe Jack never wanted to lose control around him. Maybe he didn’t dare look for a dealer in Rimouski, with how good he and Kent both were, living under all that scrutiny.

 _Gifted,_ Alicia knows, is rarely a gift.

“Here,” Kent says, handing over the misshapen smoke and a Zippo from his pocket.

“Maybe I brought my own,” Alicia says.

Kent laughs. “I wouldn’t, so you didn’t. Just light it.”

She does, and they both sit on one of his rattan chaise longues, shoulder to shoulder. Even in the shade, the heat is nearly unbearable at this hour; he bought his place for the sunrises, not the sunsets.

“Bittle came to see me,” Kent says after a while. She coughs out her fresh lungful of smoke.

“What did he want?” Something terrible occurs to her. “Please tell me he didn’t fuck you. That would be--”

“Fucked up? No, I know.” Kent shifts so he’s lying down and tugs at Alicia’s hand to steal a drag. She leaves her wrist lying limp on his chest after, hoping the cigarette will keep him talking.

“He wanted to tell me in person that the thought of me with Bob is repulsive. I think he genuinely hates Bob. Like, he hates me, fire of a thousand suns, but Bob is his guilty party.” Kent stops for a drag, blows it out contemplatively. “He also cooked for me, so I got a taste of Jack’s marriage. Fun times.”

Aicia looks back at the kitchen, thinks of the steaming plate, and thanks her lucky stars she didn’t cross paths with her son-in-law. She might’ve strangled him.

“Is that what you think?”

“Hmm?”

“That Bob is the guilty party.” She stops to think, tries to phrase it so he won’t dismiss it. “That Bob’s the reason this got out of hand, not Jack.”

Kent pulls her hand closer again, and this time, she lies down beside him instead of taking the cigarette away. The light is making her dizzy, and she looks straight up, heart pounding like she might fall right into the sky.

“I think we all should be in fucking therapy,” Kent says eventually, with a torn sort of laugh. “I think we’ve been past right answers ten fucking years ago, so now we just gotta be a different kind of selfish.”

“We’re good at selfish,” she says, a little ill. “We can do that.”

“We fucking are, Mrs. Z. So be selfish and tell me what you really want. You might get it. Brave new world.”

Alicia says, “I want you to move to Montreal in the fall when you retire.”

There. Selfish.

He learned it from her.

 

*

 

Kent scrapes away the food and washes the plate and the wineglass, which was dusty with disuse. He leaves the pots for his cleaning service. Alicia watches him from the kitchen island, polishing off the champagne.

“I’ve got a 2002 stashed in the linen closet if you want it,” Kent offers. “Sacrilege, I know.”

“Don’t mind if I do,” she says, because it’s a 2002 and Kent’s good for it. She goes to grab it, pausing to take in the state of Kent’s bedroom, and digs into the foil around the top of the bottle on the way back to the kitchen. 

“What did _he_ offer you?” she asks.

The foil is a mess. She digs a little harder, even though she’s chipping her nail polish.

“Himself.”

“Sounds like Bob, alright. And what do we say?”

“Diminishing returns,” Kent answers dutifully. Then, “I don’t know how you walked away.”

 

*

 

The truth is that Alicia didn’t walk away. It was the best sex of her life, and they had Jack, and there was nowhere specific to go if she left.

But Bob is not a machine where you put coins in, love or care or voluntary blindness, and you get something for it. Bob is a machine where you feed coins into something and all you get is feeling good about your generosity.

She made it a nicer metaphor for Kent, who was younger then and didn’t know better. Here is the truth: you get nothing you don’t claw out of the mess.

Bob probably can’t get it up anymore. But what does she know - she’s never gone over forty and she never needed Bob like his boys do.

What would happen if Jack got over the fiasco at his wedding and forgave Bob? If he gives Bob his blessing and they work together to move Kent to Providence or New York in the fall?

If the lines were drawn and Jack wasn’t on Kent’s side, she’d have to admit where her loyalties lie.

Kent is not a son to her. He’s a friend, and her friends were always her family. She can show up at his door unannounced and he’ll receive her with open arms. She gave him a key to her apartment and keeps a lighter in the bathroom for when they talk into the night.

She can’t remember the last time she shared anything real with Jack. That’s a real shame, because if Jack sides with Bob, she won’t even remember the last time she spoke to him.

 

*

 

They go out to dinner at a private restaurant close to Kent’s apartment. There was a gigantic poster of Kent in his underwear on the wall opposite the unmarked entrance, which they laughed about, but as they sit down at their table, Alicia finds herself surprised that Bob still has access to… well, all of that.

Kent is so at ease here. She knows he was at ease at the photoshoot for that ad campaign, too, in his underwear, knowing he’d be plastered on the sides of buildings. He’s so far out of Bob’s league at this point in their lives that she almost feels sorry for Bob, who either can’t see it or can’t see past it.

Whether or not Bob thinks he deserves Kent, though, Bob’s never been above playing dirty to keep the things he wants.

“They do a great calf’s kidney here,” Kent says. “The waiters flambé it in cognac. I had it last week.”

“Medium,” she decides.

“Heathen,” Kent accuses her, smirking faintly. She shrugs; he may be fine with meat that’s more wound than food, but that’s for people who’ve mastered their gag reflex.

She orders it medium rare.

All through the meal, through a bottle of wine each and Alicia teasing him about his bloody mouth, she thinks, _we could do this all the time. You’re almost safe. Take the rope._

It’s the only rope he’ll be thrown that he’s not meant to hang himself with.

 

*

 

They spill back into his apartment laughing. He wore an old embroidered Gucci shirt to the restaurant, and she follows him into the bedroom to steal it for their little afterparty.

There’s a bruise all along his side when he takes the shirt off; an angry scar across the center of it, raised and darker than the rest. It looks like the flowers on the shirt, in a sick way - it makes her think of him as he was at seventeen, fresh out of the box.

More than that, though, it makes her wonder what he’ll look like in art photography when he’s forty. What the story will look like in black and white, his ink and imperfections taken out of context, the pain scrubbed clean. She doesn’t have to wonder whether he’s thought about it too.

They airbrushed the worst of it from the underwear ad. When Kent stops selling himself, he won’t let them get away with it.

 

*

 

They’re on the floor in front of his couch when Jack calls.

“What time is it there?” Kent asks, eyes fixed on the screen.

Alicia can’t look away either. “Bold of you to assume I know where he is,” she says drily, because it’s been weeks since Jack called _her._ There’s her answer, she supposes.

“He’s home. Bittle’s… at the airport? I guess? Jack’s home. Alone.”

Kent’s not easily scared, but he’s gone a little pale, a little too still, so she takes his hand.

“He can’t give you what you want,” Alicia says, because it has to be said.

Kent drags his eyes away from the phone and looks at her instead, suddenly desperate. This boy.

This _fucking_ boy.

He says, “I don’t want anything,” which is a lie, and not a very good one.

Alicia gives his hand a squeeze. “Rephrase, Kenny.”

“Diminishing returns,” he says, knee-jerk. He glances back at the phone just as the screen goes dark. “Diminishing returns,” he repeats, quietly. It makes her eyes sting.

 

*

 

If Alicia had kept writing her autobiography, she would’ve written: _I love my son. I thought that if you love someone enough, it makes up for incompatibility. I thought unconditional love is also inexhaustible, that it would root itself deeper than other kinds of love. That it would come first, always, and translate into forgiveness, like a blank check issued from the heart._

She would’ve written: _I made a choice, and I haven’t lost any sleep over it. Whose happiness comes first, if we’re all doomed to be ourselves and do what’s in our natures? How do we forgive ourselves for quantifying love, all things being unequal? How do you decide between love that meets all your conditions and something rooted in your bones that stays there, unchanging, not affecting your life one way or another, like gravity or the certainty that the lights will come on when you hit the switch?_

But she doesn’t want to write it down. It was a relief that she never had to - a relief that Jack never plucked that heartstring when he could have, that Bob never understood the nuances.

She never wrote it down or explained it out loud, but she knows that Kent understands. That she’s even here, that she was always here, that the divorce didn’t affect Kent because she wouldn’t let it; he knows that there’s a line. He knows where the line is, and which side she stands on.

Kent doesn’t owe them shit.

And here Alicia is, having walked away from the men they both love, asking him to follow.

Another season, and Kent would end up like Bob.

**Author's Note:**

> on tumblr at @soundslikepenance


End file.
